This isn't a Christmas movie in the current sense, but Henry James introduces his classic 1898 story The Turn of the Screw, on which The Innocents is based, during the telling of gruesome ghost tales around a country house fireside on Christmas Eve. Hitchcock's Psycho, the most influential of postwar horror flicks, appeared in 1960 and launched an endless cycle of brutal slasher movies. Clayton's classic appeared the following year, and it too features a sinister house, an unwary female visitor and lurking spirits from a troubled past. But its subtlety has only occasionally been emulated.

Clayton made only seven feature films in a career that spanned more than 50 years, all based on novels of distinction, and he came to this period project after his debut with the gritty Room at the Top. Deborah Kerr gives her finest performance as the Victorian governess to a small brother and sister at a grand mansion. Ghosts of her late predecessor and his demonic lover appear to her and seem to be in contact with the children.

But is this 'a neurotic case of sex repression, and the ghosts are not real ghosts but hallucinations of the governess', as Edmund Wilson argued in a famous 1934 essay, The Ambiguity of Henry James? Clayton, with the help of an artful script largely written by Truman Capote, and brilliant photography (Freddie Francis), editing (James Clark), music (Georges Auric) and production design (Wilfred Shingleton), retains this teasing ambiguity for most of the way. His movie grips as we watch, and haunts us thereafter. It's the screen's best ghost story. Clayton was a great director with a fastidious eye for detail, a sure sense of pace, and immense sympathy for actors. But because he chose a style suitable to the work-in-hand and brought out its peculiar themes, he was not regarded as an auteur.

This excellent disc has an outstanding introductory documentary and commentary by Christopher Frayling, and the bonus of Clayton's charming 33-minute The Bespoke Overcoat (1956), a transposition of Gogol's tale to London's East End, which won an Oscar.